Mind & Desire

Episode 51 - When What Other People Do Just Doesn't Make Sense

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody who I would call a colleague, somebody working in my building who was hoping to actually get some advice from me about a situation that they had to deal with earlier on in the week. And it’s the sort of thing that comes up, at least in one respect that I’ll tell you about in just a second. 0ver and over and over again. I think that going back as far as I can remember, there have always been people (including myself at times) who had raised this sort of complaint about the bad behavior of another person. So here’s what it’s really about. They say: “I don’t understand why they did this, or do this sort of thing, or behave in this sort of way. It doesn’t make sense to me.” And that is a pretty common reaction to the kinds of situations where we feel like somebody has treated us or somebody else that we care about wrongly. We might feel hurt. We might feel disappointed. We might feel irritated. We might even feel afraid or sorry. We’re sort of resourceless. We don’t understand how this situation came to be, because here’s the crux. We’re attributing to the other person the same sort of motivational structure and evaluation of things, and the ways in which they see good and bad, right and wrong, their own responsibility, as we ourselves have. And if you think about that for a moment, you step back from the situation and you think, is this a rational thing to do? The answer very clearly, quickly and clearly, is No, because people are indeed different from each other, and they have been throughout all of history. I mean, whether you go to mythological stories, or whether you look at history, or whether you look at other things, or just consult your own experience, if you’re really being honest with yourself, people don’t always see things the same way, value the same things, behave in the same way. Their characters are sometimes established in good or bad ways, or not even really that well established. So it would be rather imprudent to hold on to a deeply set belief that I think many many people carry (I won’t estimate what the percentage could possibly be), and this deeply held belief is that at bottom we’re all basically the same. Now we are the same in certain important respects, but that sameness maybe doesn’t go as far up from the deep-down as we might expect it to. So when somebody does behave in a way that, as we say, doesn’t make sense, why would they do that? Why would they behave that way? It tends to catch people off guard because they’re experienced, expecting, desiring, planning even for a different kind of behavior that’s more like theirs. So for example (and this isn’t the case that we’re talking about here): You’re out with some people who have invited you to dinner. You could expect that: well they’re going to pay for dinner because they’re the ones who made the invitation. Or perhaps we’re all going to share the check in some sort of fair and equitable way. You don’t think, for example, that they would look at you and expect you to pay the bill, or push it over by you and kind of nod at it or ask you to do that, make a claim about missing their wallet or any of those sorts of things. That goes against expectations. And yet there are some people who will do that. How do we know that There are people who actually do that sort of thing. And some of us may have more experiences of that, or we might have to rely on other people’s experiences that they tell us about. But these things do indeed happen. People can be unjust. They can be ungenerous. They can be unfriendly. They can betray our trust or confidences. And those are the sorts of things that happen. So when we say, well that doesn’t make sense, we’re not asserting that it’s out of the realm of possibility. Not if we’re actually rational human beings. But we are caught off guard, because what they’re doing, what they’re saying, their attitudes, what they fail to do, seems incongruous or inconsistent with what we’re expecting of them. We could even say that there’s a claim made that what they’re doing is unintelligible, but I think that goes too far. It’s not unintelligible. It’s not as if we can’t understand it at all. And here’s where we’re going to get eventually to two practices that I think can be quite helpful in if you’re running into these sorts of situations for recalibrating your own attitude and mindset. So the first thing I want to say is that these sort of difficulties typically arise out of making a assumption over and over and over again. So it’s probably, as I said, deeply rooted. It’s probably something habitual. It’s probably something that one is doing, and carrying out processes of what we could call unconscious or implicit reasoning that then lead to an emotional reaction of feeling bad, feeling upset and saying: I don’t understand what’s going on here. And this assumption is simply that people in general and in their particulars are very similar or even the same as oneself in terms of what they value, what they think matters, how they expect to be treated and how they want to treat other people, how they understand situations, the amount of impulse control that they have. All of those sorts of things that go into making up a human being with a motivational structure and probably like a narrative of their life up to this point, what kind of person they are and how they’ve developed and displayed it. If we assume wrongly, without good evidence, that most people are going to be like us, well that may be the case if we are living a rather sheltered life where somebody else is doing the shock absorption and keeping us from having to deal with that or where we are indeed in a rather homogenous community, or where we have you might say a cognitive vice of having ignored evidence that is actually staring us in the face, well then we are setting ourselves up once we get into a wider world that includes people of all different varieties, some of whom may be very good and some of whom may be very bad, and other people who are kind of a mess in between, and some people who are rather kind of blah and who don’t have much character at all. When we’re in that wider world, we are going to encounter a lot of these situations where what other people are doing doesn’t make sense because we expect them to be like us. And I’m not saying that’s morally wrong. What I’m saying is that’s actually rather imprudent, not least because then you misjudge what they’re doing and you are setting yourselves up for feeling bad about things. It is indeed an odd conclusion for one to draw from experience of dealing with human beings. And I think that if you are going to pursue this line of thinking, applying it to yourself, you could say that. How did you arrive at thinking everybody was going to be like you. You had to not be paying adequate attention to how people do in fact behave and what they tell you about their motivations, whether in words or in the character And so that lack of attentiveness is something that I think has a root as well in a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the person who is surprised. Certainly a lack of self-knowledge about the fact that you aren’t paying adequate attention to the world that you live in, which includes other people of many different varieties, but probably also a lack of self-knowledge in other important ways. And this is what makes you vulnerable to those sorts of situations. So that’s one useful practice that I think can come out of this. Another one, as I was thinking about what might I say to that person who ran into that situation yet once again, is you can make distinctions, very important distinctions. And this is actually what I did in the situation the dialogue with the person as a matter of fact. We made some of these distinctions, not in a very formal way. I just did it through dialogue. So the first thing you can do is distinguish between what the person did or didn’t do, which is more factual. You can describe it in essentially factual language from two other things. One of those things is also going to be, we could say, matters of fact, the mindset that led that person to doing it, their motivational structure, the why. There’s the that, and there’s the why. And we’re going to put aside the why for just a moment, because the other thing that we can do is distinguish what it is that the person did or didn’t do from how we feel about it, how we think about it, how we judge it. And that last word leads us to realizing that what we’re talking about there is evaluation, moral qualities. We can say what they did was just or unjust, or it was good or bad or it was ugly or it was morally fine or beautiful or we can say it was harmful or helpful we can say that it was prudent or foolish we can do a lot of things with it. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s just that we don’t want to glom these things together too tightly. We actually can make better evaluations when we realize that we’re making evaluations. We should evaluate. We just want to make sure those evaluations are actually correct. So you’re already starting to make some distinctions. And we go then to the motivational structure of the person. And we can, as I mentioned, realize that yes, the person doesn’t see things the way that we do, and that’s why they’re behaving differently than we would behave in those circumstances. So they have a different mindset, they have a different motivational structure, they have a different, we could say, hierarchy of values. Whatever you want to use to make sense of that, something that’s deeply rooted in that person, in their very character. And once you do that, you don’t actually have to let them off the hook, which is I think what a lot of people think. If they say: well, they just see things differently than me, maybe I shouldn’t be judging them. Maybe I shouldn’t be evaluating them at all. No, you can actually evaluate other people’s moral character. You can say that somebody is virtuous or vicious. You can use other terms if you want to, and you’re perfectly justified in doing so. You just want to be careful about how easily you ascribe them to people on the basis of what evidence you have, and you also want to make sure that you understand what these terms mean yourself. So you don’t want to be kind of slipshod with this. And I think if you do that, if you do these two sorts of exercises or practices, whatever you want to call them, if you’re prone to these sorts of experiences, if they’re happening over and over again to you, you’ll probably enable yourself to live, if not a happier life in full, at least a life with less troubles and problems and getting upset. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO [https://reasonio.wordpress.com/], the co-founder of The Stoic Heart® [https://stoicheart.substack.com/], a speaker, writer, and producer of popular [https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler]YouTube videos [https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler] on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9] Wisdom for Life [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9], and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa] podcast [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa]. You can request short personalized videos at his [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]Cameo [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]page [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the [https://reasonio.teachable.com/]Study With Sadler Academy [https://reasonio.teachable.com/]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Episode 50 - The Concept Of Digital Natives

A number of the ideas that people use to make sense of the world and try to formulate what we ought to be doing, make recommendations, set up their own lives, engage with others, are essentially fictions or myths. And I’d like to talk about one of them in particular today that I’ve encountered, now going back at least 20 years in my work as an educator. I’m sure many of you have heard these terms thrown around for about that same amount of time. And the term, and the concept, is that of “digital native.” Usually this is tied in with a generational sort of differentiation where those of us who, for example, grew up in Generation X without the internet, without all these websites, without mobile technology would be digital immigrants, as would definitely be the baby boomers. And then the millennials were supposed to be digital natives. And then, the next generation coming up under them, the current generation in college, Generation Z or Zoomers, whatever you want to call them, are also supposed to be digital natives. On its face, it seems like a plausible idea. Those who, as children, are being introduced to and engaging with a new technology should be a bit more savvy in using it. It should feel more intuitive to them than to people who are older adults who are engaging with it without having had the benefit of childhood. Sort of like people will try to say, you know, the time for learning languages is when you’re a child. By the time that you’re an adult, your brain has become too fixed and ossified to easily learn languages, which turns out to be a good bit of nonsense, and perhaps, I won’t say wishful thinking, because it’s actually a kind of pessimistic thinking, but maybe wishful thinking for the experts who then get to play at being experts about that and use it as an excuse for why they don’t know languages that well So coming back to technology, and in particular, the technologies that are associated with the internet and with phones, you know, mobile technology and all of those sorts of matter, what was being said roughly 20 years ago, maybe a little bit even further back by the so-called pedagogical experts, was that we now needed to take into account, in addition to all the other sorts of divides, like the difference between male and female students or difference between races or any other sort of background thing like that. We also needed to take into stock when we were designing our classes and assessment measures and even thinking about what technology we were going to apply and use, whether in the classroom or in our course management systems outside of the classroom. We needed to take into account this new divide between a sort of have and have not. Those who have a normal facility and perhaps greater insights into the newer technology and those of us who have to struggle with it, who don’t have the habits already baked or built in like these younger people do. I remember one particular incident that really drove it home to me, the mindset that is involved in this. So it was a pedagogy and professional development conference. And I think the session that I was in wasn’t even really about digital divides and digital natives versus digital immigrants or any of that sort of stuff. But the presenters ended up introducing that distinction. And then there were a bunch of other people in the session who in the Q&A and response part were really hammering this point home. I looked around and I noticed the demographic disparities involved in this. So this is when I was quite young as a professor. I’d been teaching probably about... 10 years at that point. So I was in my early 40s, out of graduate school, having a good bit of experience under my belt as a Generation X instructor. And the people who were leading the workshop and carrying out most of the conversation and seemed very, very committed to this notion of digital native versus digital immigrant divide were all boomers. I’m not going to say that all boomers are the stereotypical boomer or anything like that, but these actually were. They had all the wisdom that they were going to share with us younger professors who should be taking our cues from them. about how we should be dealing with yet another generation younger than us, our millennial students. And so boomers were portraying themselves as the ones who, they were part of one big “we”: them, the bosses, we, the underlings. And we were the digital immigrants who needed to be sensitive to and structure everything around the other generation of digital natives. I noticed that there were a few older millennials in there and they were seemingly a little bit uncomfortable. And there were a lot of people my age as well. And they were some of them just kind of keeping their heads down. None of them really wanting to raise the issue, which is that this whole digital native thing is kind of BS. Yeah. Now, why do I say that? Well, because our actual experience in the classroom, many of us using technology in ways that these educational experts were often not knowing about and perhaps not even suspecting that we might be doing, we knew that we instructors actually understood the technology and could use it more readily in than the supposed digital natives, not least because we actually had to be fairly conscious about what we were doing. And so we could raise an issue here about deliberate and conscious use of a technology and more intuitive use, and say that sometimes you’re actually better off thinking about what you’re doing rather than just responding in a gut way. But it went really far beyond that. What I noticed in my classes were that despite having cell phones, despite having grown up in an environment that included the internet and being on computers, most of my students really did not know how to use them effectively, even when it came to things like doing searches for information using a search engine, by that time almost completely Google, or writing papers and formatting them easily and up to standards in a word processing program, or how to effectively send emails. And that’s a very, very basic technology. A lot of them knew on a very surface level how to do these sorts of things, but didn’t really understand once things got tricky, what they should do next. or how to find information that would be useful for them, or any of the limitations of the technology that they were using. If they were indeed natives, they were natives who didn’t understand their own supposed special environment, as well as the people who came in from the outside, we might say, temporally. And so this entire narrative or dichotomy, or whatever you want to have it, ideology perhaps, of digital natives and digital immigrants who are very different, almost like dogs and cats to each other, or you know how “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This all collapses when you look at it carefully. And I still see people making a lot of reference to it today. But indeed, it tends to still be boomers who are saying those sorts of things, and not people in Generation X, who perhaps had a better vantage point since we had a lot. more technology that we grew up with, but it was technology that we had to master. It wasn’t quite so easy to use when you got a computer. First you actually, back in the day, had to learn how to use an operating system like DOS or some other thing to program what you wanted. And then eventually, you know, we get all of the mouse and point and click and windows and pick whatever else you want to talk about. And things in some respects get easier, but also get harder to really know precisely what you’re doing with. I’m not going to say that younger people per se don’t know what they’re doing. But many of them don’t seem to be, if they are digital natives, natives who know more than just a city block of their environment. And that’s a big problem when we want to make these generalizations. So it’s something I’ve been thinking about today. I thought it might be interesting for people, to talk about and think about, and perhaps compare their own experiences or their own assumptions about this contested term. I will actually close this out by throwing out a modest proposal, which is actually quite a radical one when you’re not just calling it “modest”, which is that we should retire this term. It turns out to be pretty useless for picking out any sort of reality that would help us in figuring out policy or education or anything that really matters to us. Should we replace it with another term? Only if we’re going to make the concept better, fuller, more flexible than it currently stands. It’s really more of a mistake waiting to happen than anything else. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Episode 49: The Practice Of Taking A Pause, Whether "Stoic" Or Not

This post is public so feel free to share it. Recently, I was a guest on another podcast, as I do from time to time, going on other people’s platforms and talking with them about whatever it is that they want to bring me in for. And in this case, the person wanted to talk about Stoicism and specifically Epictetus, and they hit me with a term that I wasn’t really familiar with but I could say “I think I know what you’re talking about”, especially after they cited a passage and explained what they meant. It’s not something that’s actually new, but the term that’s circulating around is relatively new it’s being labeled as the “Stoic pause.”. The general idea behind it is one that you can find articulated across the Stoic corpus. Seneca talks about it. Epictetus talks about it. Marcus Aurelius talks about it. And so do others as well, and for good reason. And it’s basically just this. Before you allow your reasoning processes or your reactions or your feelings or whatever it happens to be, to lead you to have a response, take a little break. Introduce a little pause temporally into the process. And for the person who was asking me about this, he thought this had to do specifically with the notion of handling what the Stoics call “impressions” or “appearances”, or even “imaginations”, phantasiai, and whether we give assent to them or don’t give assent to them. And that’s all part of the picture, to be sure, but it’s not quite so simple and straightforward as that in all the Stoic writings. There’s lots of passages where those people that I already talked about will say: ‘when you run into this, then pause for a moment and say, examine what’s going on with yourself.” It might be examine the impressions that are impinging upon you, test them to see if they are what they think they are. It could also be pause for a moment so you can choose what you’re going to do. It might be framed in terms of reasoning processes that we could call unconscious, or subliminal, or implicit, or below the level of our conscious thinking. But we are engaging in thinking nonetheless, as we can later reconstruct it. And if we’re paying attention, we can actually see what’s And a lot of our emotions from a Stoic perspective, particularly the emotions that they call the perturbationes, the ones that are getting in the way, “perturbations” is a literal translation of the disruptive emotions. They usually involve a set of judgments that we’re making, and we make those judgments because we have some appearances or impressions coming in, and then we think about those and we respond in turn. So this isn’t the be-all and end-all of what Stoic practice would be, but it’s very helpful to do. Really, we could say you cannot function without doing this, and doing it repetitively and doing it consciously, and over time with practice getting good at it. If you don’t do it, all the other stuff that you do is probably not going to work out very well for you. This is going to be one big deficit area. So far, so good, right? That’s an important idea, taking a pause, not just to take a pause and count to 10 or something like that, but to actually refocus your attention on: “Hey, what’s going on here today?”, and paying attention to what it is that you think, what it is that you feel, the judgments that you’re making, what information you’re using that might be a little dubious. All those sorts of things. That’s all great. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s also not distinctively Stoic. And to call it the “Stoic pause”, I’m not sure who came up with this term, is a little bit weird and culty, and maybe a little bit too grifter self-helpy as well. Because again, it’s not the unique property of Stoic philosophy. It would be sort of like talking about “Greg Sadler’s soccer kick,” right? Everybody else plays soccer in the world. Of course, many of them call it “football” and we could change it to “Greg Sadler’s football kick”. Well, so many other people are doing it. You would hear that and you’d be like, why are you bringing Greg Sadler into this as distinctive? So there’s nothing particularly Stoic about this. All of the other robust virtue ethics that we can find throughout the centuries, not just in Western philosophy, but also in Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, all over the place, are going to advise that at least at some point in time, you pay attention to and slow down your reactions, and analyze your own thought processes and emotions, and pay attention to habits and all of that sort of stuff. So just shifting back to the Western sphere and talking about ancient mediterranean and near eastern thought on this, well the Platonists advise doing that. You’ve just got to read Plutarch a bit and you’ll see that. The Aristotelians definitely suggest doing this. The Stoics do. The Epicureans do. Even the Skeptics who some of them don’t believe in much of anything, they certainly are suggesting doing that as well. This shows you that we’re already covering a lot of ground But it’s not just philosophy people. We could say that this is an important part of many religious traditions as well. And so you can find in the Biblical Wisdom literature some references to doing this sort of thing. We can say that it also pops up in literature as well. And speaking of literature, it even shows up in science fiction. I brought up in that particular session, that recording on the person’s podcast, that one prime example of this is from A.E. Van Vogt, who was a Golden Age science fiction writer, probably most famous for his World of Null-A and Slan, but he wrote a lot of other works as well. And he called it the “thalmic pause”, because he was saying you put the part of your brain that likes to make snap decisions on a sort of pause ,and you think through what’s actually going on here. He’s describing exactly the same process. Now, of course, if you know your history about this guy, Van Vogt had some philosophical training, specifically, he was involved with the Institute for General Semantics and Korzybski and those people. But there’s many other people who advise taking some sort of pause before making a snap judgment or a decision. I mean, we might even say that we see something like this going on in the very first book of the Iliad, because Achilles is hearing what Agamemnon has to say, and he’s getting angry, and he’s thinking: “I should kill this b*****d right here where he stands. I’m going to pull up my sword and do this jerk in. He’s not a very good king at all.” And Athena helps him to stay his hand. This might be a prime example of this sort of thing. And, you know, we have a great character in Homer who will often do that sort of thing, and typically only gets himself in deep trouble when he makes quick decisions, and that’s Odysseus. So it’s not as if this is a distinctively philosophical idea, let alone just a Stoic idea, but it is a really good thing to do. I think philosophies might be particularly helpful for helping us understand why we should do it, how it can be beneficial to us, and then what we should be filling that pause with, how we should be examining the thought processes and decision-making processes, the evaluations that we’re engaged in. So I’m not going to call this the “Stoic pause” myself, because as we’ve just talked about, it’s got a much wider base than just Stoicism. But if somebody wants to call it the “Stoic pause”, that’s up to them. They can certainly do that. But I do think it’s something that all of us would benefit from incorporating into our practice, even if we get away from our ordinary lives. And we’re just talking about studying philosophy. I’ll give you just a prime example of this before we end here. So you’re reading something and you think you understand exactly what the author is saying. And they write something that to you seems really, really stupid, and you find yourself thinking: “Why am I reading this dummy? I’m wasting my time with an idiot like this.” Well, that’s a great place to take a pause. You might actually be right. Now, you might be right in your assessment that they’re an idiot, and have gotten something fundamentally wrong, and then wrote about it. You might also be wrong at the same time, that it’s a total waste of your time. So you should actually look at the connection between those two statements, right? Because one doesn’t necessarily imply the other. But odds are, if they’re a great thinker, and you are reading them for the first or eighth time, and other people think that reading them is valuable, and as you’re reading them, your take is: “No, this person is stupid and their ideas are stupid.” Odds are that you’re missing something, and you’re probably bringing something to the reading that’s getting in the way. So you might want to take a pause there and think about how you are responding and whether it really makes all that much sense. And if you do that, you will probably save yourself some headaches and not throw away books that would be useful for you to refocus on. So you see that even outside of our ordinary scope of life, if you’re just doing study, this pause, whatever you want to call it. We could call it the “Stoic pause", the “Platonic pause, the “A.E. Van Vogt” pause, whatever you want to call it. This practice of pausing, and then filling that pause with the sorts of mental activities that are going to be helpful for you, this can be incredibly powerful. And you’re probably going to need to do this thousands of times over the course of your life in order to be happy. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO [https://reasonio.wordpress.com/], a speaker, writer, and producer of popular [https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler]YouTube videos [https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler] on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9] Wisdom for Life [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9], and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa] podcast [https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa]. You can request short personalized videos at his [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]Cameo [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]page [https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler]. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the [https://reasonio.teachable.com/]Study With Sadler Academy [https://reasonio.teachable.com/]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Episode 48: Not Making Judgements About Philosophy Based On "Vibes"

I’ve had a few queries and comments, mostly in YouTube but also in some other places lately, that got me thinking about a sort of general topic. And this is one of those, if the shoe fits, wear it. Many of you listening to this, probably this isn’t the case for you, but you might know somebody that this would be helpful for to hear, or maybe just share this idea with them. And I’m going to put it in a really flippant sort of contemporary culture way. You don’t want to make judgments about philosophy or philosophers based on what the kids these days call “vibes”. And actually, it’s not just the kids these days. There’s lots of other people who use the term ironically, and it’s been around for a very long time. I mean, longer than my generation, the generation before mine, the boomers were talking about good vibes. And so, you know, it’s made its way back into the popular parlance and taken up a seat in popular conversations about philosophy and many, many other fields as well for, I would say, close to a decade now. And what do I mean by this? So we could get a little bit more expansive and perhaps even rigorous about this notion. People have been doing this for a very, very long time, going way back in the literature that we have, you’ve got to do some work in order to find it, I imagine. But I’ve encountered this in literature, about literature, about philosophy, about other fields as well. And it consists in making a judgment not based on actually spending time reading the thinker and working through their thought in a kind of careful and receptive manner and then coming to a well-founded conclusion about them but instead taking shortcuts, going by your gut, or reading for the gist, and only catching maybe 10% of what’s being said, or even just going by what you’ve heard about them from other people, and using that as sort of your input as you then start reading your way through people. I’m going to give you a prime example of this that happened recently, and it was in Substack, and it was specifically about Alasdair MacIntyre, because I’m advertising that I’m teaching this upcoming class on MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which is a complex book. It’s covering a lot of the history of ideas coming all the way up to present culture, and you know there’s a good bit of sophistication to it. This person asked about something that showed me that they they didn’t really know that much about MacIntyre, and whatever ideas they had were kind of garbled and They asked about universal moral frameworks. Does MacIntyre ever deliver on his promise to provide that? And that’s exactly the opposite of what MacIntyre does. He mentions universal moral frameworks as something that the Enlightenment was attempting to provide us with and then failing to do so over and over and over again with a number of different attempts, a number of different responses and steps. And he’s quite right about that. And so this person, you know, maybe they were reading and not reading attentively, so they fell into the mistake of thinking that the philosopher who is criticizing a position is actually endorsing that position. So I wrote them back and I was like: yeah, MacIntyre doesn’t do that. If you think that he is, why don’t you cite me (and I’m being flippant here), cite me some chapter and verse, meaning tell me where in the text you’re actually finding this. And their response was to say: Well you know, I just read a few chapters of it and that was the impression that I got from it. And I wrote back and said, well, see, there’s your mistake. You don’t ever want to make judgments about a philosophical work or about a philosopher or about a school based just on small sample size and your first impressions of that, because they’re probably going to be wrong. And I’m going to say right up front (well not exactly up front, because I’ve been talking now for several minutes about that!), but I’m going to lay it out for you: I’ve done that myself plenty of times. And I think pretty much every one of us who’s in the philosophy business for a while has probably fallen into that mistake, but we don’t want to say that as reason for justifying it. We actually want to say: Oh, I can relate to you. It’s an easy mistake to make early on, and you definitely want to avoid it. Those of us who did, we can say, yeah, it led me into some blind alleys and reasoning wrongly about what I should read and what I shouldn’t read, and what different people are thinking. And it’s better to be disabused of that illusion that you’ve actually got it figured out based on vibes or impressions or feels or whatever you want to call it. It’s better to have something solid, something that actually does relate to the text in a way that’s reasonably representative of it so that you can have good judgments going forward. And you know, I had somebody just today in YouTube who asked a question that actually made me laugh a bit. They wanted to know whether taking a course in formal logic would help them as they go to study continental philosophy, and so I had to tell them: No actually that’s not going to be of any help whatsoever. And I was kind of wondering where they got that idea from. I suppose they thought that formal logic is going to be helpful for everything. It’s not even helpful for most analytic philosophy quite frankly, If you’re reading around in actual analytic philosophy, particularly the classical works in it, let’s say from the first 30, 40 years of the inception of that new way of doing philosophy, And the person responded by saying: well you know, I’ve read some Hegel and I’ve read some Zizek. So I thought maybe as I’m going to read other continental philosophy, formal logic would actually be quite helpful. And then I got a formal logic textbook and I found it quite difficult. And I thought: well, I don’t think you’ve actually read Hegel and Zizek then. Or you have “read” them, but that means you sort of like ran your eyes over them and digested some of the words. But there’s no way that you attentively studied Hegel, say going through the entire Phenomenology, or the Science of Logic or even the Philosophy of Right, or even any of the lectures, and worked your way through that and then found sort of an intro level formal logic class difficult. It’s just not going to be the case. So I think the same would hold for Zizek. Zizek is a very stream of consciousness thinker in some of his works. His earlier works are actually quite rigorous and you need to understand a lot in order to make sense of what he’s saying adequately. So clearly this person felt that they understood Hegel and Zizek in some respect, but I don’t think that they did. And we don’t have to single out continental philosophy in this respect. I think there’s lots of people who go by vibes when it comes to Spinoza, right? They are attracted to some ideas that they maybe got in somewhat digested form, even in the media of memes and they’re like, yeah, this is a really cool guy. Everything’s substance. I’m just a mode of substance. And well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Or people do this with Aristotle. Aristotle is the best thinker ever. And then you’re like: well, I don’t think you’ve actually read that much of his works. People who, for example, will talk about the organon in very glowing terms and then want to apply those logical works, which usually they don’t actually read the whole of. They’ll read the Categories and On Interpretation and the two Analytics, and then that’s it for them. They don’t read the Topics, which is an amazing, important work and would actually be quite helpful for them to do. And it’s quite different than the other works as well that get classified in that. But people talk about this and it’s sort of like when I’ve talked in the past about texts with aura, ideas, thinkers take on a kind of aura, a positive set of feels that then get contrasted to other things the other philosophers. They’re not as good as Aristotle he’s The Prince of Philosophers, or the Philosopher, as Thomas Aquinas called him. And none of this is actually going to be helpful for a person who wants to genuinely study and make progress in this complicated field that we call philosophy. I bring it up in part because, again, if the shoe fits, wear it. If you’re falling into this sometimes, not necessarily all the time, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably inclined towards philosophy already and not making these sorts of beginner level mistakes all the time. But we can fall into this. If you know people who could benefit from hearing this message, maybe you want to pass that along to them. You can send them this if you want to. You’re probably able to reproduce this in your own voice and words in a conversation with them. And it might actually turn out to be quite helpful to take a stumbling block out of the way that holds people back from using the precious time that they have for studying philosophy in a more productive manner. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Episode 47 - The One Single Thing I'd Like Most To Stress About Ethics

Last week, I gave a podcast interview and we ranged over a number of interesting questions. I got asked one by the host that, you know, it seems sort of a easy question, almost a softball at first. And I suppose for some people, if they have oversimplistic views on ethics, it might really be one. But for me, it was a tough question. I had to think about it quite a bit. And so here’s the question as far as I remember it. I mean, we’ll find out when the podcast actually comes out what the exact wording was. But it was something along the lines of, “if you can only say one single thing, make one point for the average person or the audience of people out there in general about ethics, what would it be?” And like I said, that is not an easy one for someone like me who thinks that ethics is kind of deep and complicated. And it’s not that people can’t get it, but there’s a lot of as we say moving parts, and you don’t want to leave them out any more than you’d want to say: “hey, let’s simplify the toaster or the car, we’ll get rid of all the parts that aren’t absolutely necessary.” And then you find out you’ve actually gotten rid of some of the necessary parts when you try to use it. So I think for people who are committed to some sort of very hardcore substantive ethics that they think covers everything, like you know, you could be a Kantian and be like, just follow the categorical imperative. And then, of course, you have to explain the categorical imperative, which has at least three formulations. But we’ll put that aside. Or if you’re a utilitarian and you’re saying, follow the greatest happiness principle. Well, okay, that sounds good, but it requires a lot of explaining and then showing how it actually works in practice and answering objections. And you might think of the old Google motto, just don’t be evil. Well, that’s so contentless, it doesn’t tell you anything actually helpful. But I think a lot of people do approach ethics in that way, because they’ve already got some point of view staked out that they think really covers everything. And I just don’t have that sort of approach. I have a much more complicated and messy approach that is you know what we sometimes call “ethical pluralism”, thinking that there’s multiple principles that we need to bring to bear. I am of course a virtue ethicist, but virtue ethics isn’t as simple as just be virtuous or do what virtue would tell you, because there’s a lot more to it than that. So I did have an answer, and I’m fairly satisfied with this answer, and I’m going to give it to you here. But it’s one that as I think about it, more each time that I mull it over, which is what I’m doing here with you, it winds up getting a little bit more complicated. I’ll probably have to write a piece about this before too long. So I’m kind of working my thoughts out here. So when I was asked the question, after I took a tiny little pause and bought myself some time by saying wow, that’s a tough question there. I didn’t have a Twix bar like in the commercial to chew on or anything like that. I said something along these lines. What I would want to say is that whatever good you’re doing by a particular choice or action that you are intending actually doing, what you need to keep in mind is that even if the action fails or somehow goes astray, there are factors that you didn’t know about, or it just goes unnoticed. Maybe it was to help somebody and they don’t realize that they’re being helped. Or if something else undoes it, or even if it’s just like seemingly a little drop in not just the bucket, but an ocean that is the wider world, The good that you accomplish or even just intend (intending is a sort of accomplishing), is real. And even though it’s limited, that doesn’t take away its reality. And its reality is not just that it exists, but that it is indeed true. Even if it’s not perfectly good, because most things aren’t, that doesn’t take away what goodness it has. And why do I think this is the most important thing for me to say? Because I’ve seen so many people who are on one side of this or the other. They’re the doer of the good action and they see it somehow not come to full fruition and they feel as if what they did was nothing. it didn’t accomplish anything. It didn’t embody any good. It didn’t improve anything. And they can get discouraged and that might lead them to not do it in the future. But even if like their universe was to end right there, I would still give them that advice and say, the good that you did is still good. Keep that in mind. And on the other side, I think there’s a lot of people who are perfectionists, not just for themselves, but for lots of other people as well. They’re kind of critics, they’re naysayers, they’re the ones who say: well, you think you did something, but look at it. Oh, it’s not really a good thing at all, because it’s not a perfect good, or an eternally lasting good, or the best or anything like that. So we live in a world where this happens an awful lot. And I just think it’s really important for somebody at least to be consistently putting that message out. And maybe I’m not the only one to do that, thank goodness. But if I have to be the one to stress this over and over again, well I’m happy to do so, because it was a hard-won insight that for me that took a long time and experience and thinking about things for it to stick for me and I know that other people would benefit from hearing it as well and I do have a couple you know like corollaries and follow-ups to this as well which goes a little bit against the “hey, what’s the one thing that you want to say”? If you’re smuggling in corollaries, now you’re saying two things, three things, four things. But indulge me for a moment while I bring up another thing that I did say in the podcast, and then one other thing that I didn’t say in the podcast but I’ve been thinking about So the first thing is that there’s a kind of perfectionism that a lot of people succumb to and try to impose on other people in ethics. And we have this phrase, “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” meaning don’t let the fact that you’re aiming at some imaginary, not real best, some superlative, become the impediment to you actually choosing and doing and perhaps even sustaining something that is genuinely good, albeit not the best. So I think everybody’s heard that phrase, or at least if you hadn’t before, now you’ve got a good idea what it means and you can relate to it. And I want to add a little bit more there. So, you know, we can talk about the superlative, which is the best. We can talk about the whatever we want to call it, maybe substantive, the good. And then in between, we have something else that we call the comparative, and that is the better term, right? It’s not the best, and it’s not just the good. It’s where one good is more good than another good, and we can compare them back and forth. And that’s why we call it the comparative. So we could say, you know thinking about ice cream, and this is going to seem completely arbitrary to you: Vanilla that’s good. Vanilla is nice to have. Butter pecan, well that’s better. What’s the best? I don’t know. For me, it probably is mint chocolate chip. For you, it’s going to be something different. But you notice we’ve got like a hierarchy that we set out there. So what’s the upshot for this? I think we need to watch out not just for the best being the enemy of the good, but also for the best becoming an impediment to discerning and choosing and recognizing the better, as indeed a greater good than other goods, but not necessarily the apex of goodness itself. Because a lot of what we’re doing in ethics is not simply choosing between the good and the bad. It’s nice when things are that straightforward and obvious. Instead, we have to look at different kinds of things that are good and decide, well in this situation, which of them is better than than the other one. And we’d be foolish if we pick the lesser good instead of what we recognize to be the greater good, the better. But if we’re being perfectionists, if we’re always needing the best, we could have just the same attitude towards the better as we have towards the good, and we might think: ah you know, maybe the better isn’t even really better. And we might even come to think that it’s not even truly good. So I think this is a corollary. The other one that I wanted to bring up is that if we can say that the good that we do, even if it doesn’t last forever and seems to be easily dissipated or disappearing in an entire ocean where it’s a mere drop or anything along those lines, we can say the same thing about the opposite of the good the bad or the evil however you want to put it and some people will try to justify the bad that they do by, you know reference to some greater good. Or they’ll say: well it’s really not so bad, or they’ll say: well I did a bad thing, but nobody caught me, or I intended to do something bad, but it didn’t come off, so everything’s okay. Well, if we’re going to say that whatever good we do is something positive and real, I think we also need to be honest with ourselves about the bad as well and say,if there weren’t bad consequences that resulted from it, if I had a bad intention, even though it wasn’t fulfilled, it’s still bad. And that’s a thought that I think needs to go along with this one single thing. So another corollary. And like I said, I’m in process of working out my full thoughts on this. It’s not as if I haven’t had plenty of time indeed to think about these things over the course of time in the past. But these are murky matters that I think could use some additional reflection and articulation. So you can look forward to seeing me writing something about this down the line. But for now, that’s where my reflections stand. I hope this is something helpful for you. And if it is, you know, feel free to leave a comment about that. And don’t just say that it is helpful, but maybe say how it’s helpful for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe [https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]